arXiv subjects

Addi Malviya Thakur

Publications and source records attributed to Addi Malviya Thakur.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Uncovering Scientific Software Sustainability through Community Engagement and Software Quality Metrics

Scientific open-source software (Sci-OSS) projects are critical for advancing research, yet sustaining these projects long-term remains a major challenge. This paper explores the sustainability of Sci-OSS hosted on GitHub, focusing on two factors drawn from stewardship organizations: community engagement and software quality. We map sustainability to repository metrics from the literature and mined data from ten prominent Sci-OSS projects. A multimodal analysis of these projects led us to a novel visualization technique, providing a robust way to display both current and evolving software metrics over time, replacing multiple traditional visualizations with one. Additionally, our statistical analysis shows that even similar-domain projects sustain themselves differently. Natural language analysis supports claims from the literature, highlighting that project-specific feedback plays a key role in maintaining software quality. Our visualization and analysis methods offer researchers, funders, and developers key insights into long-term software sustainability.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Beyond the Grave: An Empirical Study of Dormancy and Revival in Scientific Open-Source Software

Background. Inactivity thresholds classify scientific open-source software (OSS) as abandoned but cannot distinguish permanent abandonment from temporary dormancy; moving the cutoff from 1 to 36 months changes the abandoned count in the SciCat corpus from 18,030 to 8,010. Aims. We characterize dormancy causes, revival mechanisms, recovery durability, and lifecycle archetypes in dormant-revived scientific OSS. Method. From 18,247 SciCat repositories we identify 2,984 dormant-revived candidates and field-code a stratified sample of 750 projects with 75 analyst-coders under a two-phase adjudication protocol (post-adjudication kappa 0.779-0.857). A rule-based classifier produces five dimensions: dormancy cause (T1), revival mechanism (T2), nature of revival work (T3), revival sustainability (T4), and lifecycle archetype (T5). Results. Dormancy cause is unresolvable from repository evidence for 52.5% of projects; among resolvable cases, feature/milestone freeze outnumbers research-output completion 5.4:1. Non-sustained recovery outnumbers sustained 2.14:1; 11.5% of apparent revivals are bot-only or single-spike artifacts. Lifecycle archetype is more strongly associated with sustainability than revival mechanism or work type (medium effect on the structurally-independent subset). Conclusions. A fixed inactivity threshold is insufficient to reliably classify scientific OSS abandonment. Gap duration, lifecycle archetype, and contributor continuity together provide more discriminating information than any single threshold.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Scientific Open-Source Software Is Less Likely to Become Abandoned Than One Might Think! Lessons from Curating a Catalog of Maintained Scientific Software

Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can hinder scientific progress, yet, in contrast to other types of software, its longevity is poorly understood. Existing data curation efforts are fragmented by science domain and/or are small in scale and lack key attributes. We use large language models to classify public software repositories in World of Code into distinct scientific domains and layers of the software stack, curating a large and diverse collection of over 18,000 scientific software projects. Using this data, we estimate survival models to understand how the domain, infrastructural layer, and other attributes of scientific software affect its longevity. We further obtain a matched sample of non-scientific software repositories and investigate the differences. We find that infrastructural layers, downstream dependencies, mentions of publications, and participants from government are associated with a longer lifespan, while newer projects with participants from academia had shorter lifespan. Against common expectations, scientific projects have a longer lifetime than matched non-scientific open-source software projects. We expect our curated attribute-rich collection to support future research on scientific software and provide insights that may help extend longevity of both scientific and other projects.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

A cast of thousands: How the IDEAS Productivity project has advanced software productivity and sustainability

Computational and data-enabled science and engineering are revolutionizing advances throughout science and society, at all scales of computing. For example, teams in the U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project have been tackling new frontiers in modeling, simulation, and analysis by exploiting unprecedented exascale computing capabilities-building an advanced software ecosystem that supports next-generation applications and addresses disruptive changes in computer architectures. However, concerns are growing about the productivity of the developers of scientific software, its sustainability, and the trustworthiness of the results that it produces. Members of the IDEAS project serve as catalysts to address these challenges through fostering software communities, incubating and curating methodologies and resources, and disseminating knowledge to advance developer productivity and software sustainability. This paper discusses how these synergistic activities are advancing scientific discovery-mitigating technical risks by building a firmer foundation for reproducible, sustainable science at all scales of computing, from laptops to clusters to exascale and beyond.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Giving RSEs a Larger Stage through the Better Scientific Software Fellowship

The Better Scientific Software Fellowship (BSSwF) was launched in 2018 to foster and promote practices, processes, and tools to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes. BSSwF's vision is to grow the community with practitioners, leaders, mentors, and consultants to increase the visibility of scientific software production and sustainability. Over the last five years, many fellowship recipients and honorable mentions have identified as research software engineers (RSEs). This paper provides case studies from several of the program's participants to illustrate some of the diverse ways BSSwF has benefited both the RSE and scientific communities. In an environment where the contributions of RSEs are too often undervalued, we believe that programs such as BSSwF can be a valuable means to recognize and encourage community members to step outside of their regular commitments and expand on their work, collaborations and ideas for a larger audience.

cs.SE↗